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Archive for January, 2007:


Why Artificial Intelligence if you can have Peer-Peer Intelligence ?

Published by in general technology, world 2.0 on January 28th, 2007

It is interesting to note how competitive the search world is getting. The eternal quest for ‘finding the right answer’ is leading this technically advanced generation back to the basics – why not utilize the intelligence of the actual human brain that we are all trying to simulate ? Solutions like the recently discontinued ‘Google Answers’ and the currently blossoming Yahoo Answers are examples where you can ask targetted questions to ‘experts’, who can provide you with educated answers. However, in this model, the ‘experts’ are usually more qualified than the average Joe. The power of involving real humans is when you can expand in scale, as well as make it attractive for those contributors, in terms of personal profit. In other words, a model that can utilize the ‘spare time’ of millions of people to offer collective intelligence. Another example of this is the recently launched Linked In’s Question tab. For those who don’t know, LinkedIn is a business networking tool that allows you to connect to several industry professionals. I use it a lot as well. Now that LinkedIn has a great network of Friends, Friends of Friends and so on, it makes sense then, to traverse this

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Reader Warning: Messed up Feed

Published by in offbeat on January 17th, 2007

*!@$!XX!@* Feb 09 Update: I found a way to fix blogger’s feed sort order. Instead of providing my atom feed to feedburner, I created a Yahoo pipe to sort my feed and provided the Yahoo pipe’s RSS to feedburner. So hopefully, after I make this change, you should not see it at the top of the feed. If you do, I have work to do ! Update: Looks like the new Blogger will continue to re-order posts based on update date. Yeesh and !@$!XX!@* again. read more here. Folks, sorry, but it looks like the feed to my website is completely messed up, ever since I upgraded to Blogger Beta. I use feedburner, which in turn takes it feed from the blogger feed at http://corporaterat.blogspot.com/atom.xml . If you look at that Atom feed, you would notice all my posts are topsy turvy, missing posts, and old posts showing up front. Of course, I should have researched before I upgraded, but it is too late now – I am at the mercy of Google to fix rss. The positive side: As part of the blogger upgrade is I now have labels (see sidebar) so you can view based on category. Not

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Web 2.0 and AJAX – fundamentally insecure ?

Published by in security, world 2.0 on January 17th, 2007

In the past couple of days, I’ve been delving into supposed security issues that the new Web 2.0 and AJAX enabled sites produce and have been also looking into some claims I heard that for serious applications, one should stick to Flash, since it is inherently more secure, tried and tested than AJAX is today. To investigate the inherent and publicized security issues within AJAX, we first need to understand the underlying technologies that AJAX uses. Specifically, AJAX comprises of: a) XMLHttpRequest (XHR)– a new functionality, that has been added to most well known browsers today that allow an asynchronous communication mechanism between the browser and the webserver b) Client side JavaScript – been around for a long time, an implementation of the ECMA script specification and used as a programming language for many web based applications To properly assess AJAX related security issues, then, it makes sense for us to take a look at what sort of security issues do these two critical underlying technologies present. XSS – Cross-Site Scripting attacks – A Javascript and URL handling exploit The concept here is straight-forward. XSS is not a technology – it refers to a technique, where a malicious user can

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iPhone: The world’s best micro-tablet … not Phone

Published by in mobile, voip on January 11th, 2007

image credit So by now, everyone must have been pouring in and arguing all about the iPhone device that Apple Computer released at CES(oops) Macworld. If you missed the master-presenter, Steve Job’s video, you can see it here. As I see it, the iPhone is a marvelous design. No question about it. Infact, when Steve started by saying “The Killer App is making a call !” I thought he got it right on. Consumers want good voice, easy use, reliable communication. But then as he went on to talk about Photoalbums, using two fingers to zoom in and out, and so forth, I wondered what it had to do with ‘making a call’. Having said that, I thought the Random Access Voice mail feature is very nice and very useful. Ofcourse, this is a feature that is not restricted to the iPhone – I bet it will come in on all phones with even the smallest LCD – since this is really a network side feature. How much the iPhone means to you depends on whether you consider your phone as a ‘lifestyle’ device or a ‘communication device’. When the iPod was released, it effectively turned around the portable music

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IMS-Lite

Published by in 3gpp, voip on January 9th, 2007

(this post is somewhat ad-hoc right now. I may clean it up later)Okay, after reading Steve Job’s macworld 2007 report by engadget on the iPhone, I really don’t feel like talking about bellhead technology, but here goes.. Just about when a set of specifications gets too ambitious and onerous, a vendor’s engineering department concludes that they really need something ‘leaner’ for their particular market. At the same time the marketing department wants to ride the wave of popularity by associating their ‘leaner’ product to a well known acronym. As a result, you get xxx-Ready or xxx-Lite, where the former effectively means ‘we don’t support xxx yet, but we sure can, since our product has great open interfaces, and has architected by the best architects in the world, believe us’ and the latter effectively means ‘we sliced and diced xxx, selected the parts we need, threw the others away, and it may not really be a 100% compliant to xxx but it is 100% complaint if you use us and our partners exclusively’. ‘IMS-Lite’ is a term that is floating around in the market today and is being used by several vendors to describe a ‘subset’ of functionality as well as

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© Arjun Roychowdhury. My personal opinions only.